3
P
rince
of
A
sturias
A
wards
1981-2014. S
peeches
Laureates. Excerpts
The distinction you have bestowed on my work comes from Spain, the land of Miguel de Cervantes
Saavedra, the author of the greatest novel ever written, but through that novel also the founding
father of humanities. Cervantes was the first to accomplish what we all working in humanities
try, with only mixed success and within our limited abilities, to do. As another novelist, Milan
Kundera, put it: Cervantes sent Don Quixote to tear up the curtains patched together of myths,
masks, stereotypes, prejudgments and pre-interpretations; curtains that cover up tightly the world
we inhabit and which we struggle to understand, but are bound to struggle in vain as long as the
curtain is not raised or torn up. Don Quixote was not a conqueror; he was conquered. But in his
defeat, as Cervantes showed us, he demonstrated that “all we can do in the face of that ineluctable
defeat called life is to try to understand it.” This was Miguel de Cervantes’ great, epochal discovery;
once made, it cannot ever be forgotten. We all, in humanities, follow the trail which that discovery
laid open. It is thanks to Cervantes that we are here.
To tear up the curtain, to understand life…What does this mean? We humans would prefer to
inhabit an orderly, clean and transparent world in which good and evil, beauty and ugliness, truth
and lies are neatly separated from each other and never mix, so that we can be sure how things are,
where to go and how to proceed; we dream of a world in which judgments and decisions can be
made without the arduous labour of understanding. It is of this dream of ours that ideologies are
born; those dense curtains that stop looking short of seeing. It is to this incapacitating inclination
of ours that Étienne de la Boétie gave the name of “voluntary servitude”. And it was the trail out
and away from that servitude which Cervantes blazed for us to follow, by presenting the world
in all its naked, uncomfortable yet liberating, reality: a reality of the multitude of meanings and
irreparable shortage of absolute truths. It is in such a world, in a world in which the sole certainty is
the certainty of uncertainty, that we are bound to attempt, ever again and each time inconclusively,
to understand ourselves and each other, to communicate, and so live with each other and for each
other.
This is the task in which humanities try to assist fellow humans; at least what they ought to be
trying, if they wish to remain faithful to Miguel de Cervantes Saavedra’s legacy.
Zygmunt Bauman
—
Prince of Asturias Award
for Communication and
Humanities
2010
Excerpt from the speech given on the
occasion of receiving the Prince of
Asturias Award for Communication
and Humanities on 22/10/2010.
